Hail Mary: The Limits of Hollywood Science Fiction
Is Project Hail Mary a great adventure or just a reflection of our ego? A space odyssey that, while thrilling, presents us with an alien who is all too human. A critique of how Hollywood prefers to tame the unknown rather than let itself be challenged.
8 de abr. de 2026 — Ana Iriarte
I went to the movies to see Hail Mary the week it premiered: two hours of pure entertainment and sweet popcorn. I haven't read Andy Weir's novel, so the following notes are based solely on the film.
The story is a space adventure that follows the classic hero's journey without surprises (but effectively). Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, is a school teacher who receives the call to adventure: an invitation to join Project Hail Mary, humanity's only hope against an alien threat that is dimming the sun. Professor Grace initially rejects the call, then gets involved, finds a mentor and allies, overcomes the challenges he faces, learns something fundamental about himself (in this case, the value of friendship, of risking one's life for another), and returns with the “elixir” (the microorganisms that will save Earth). Predictable, yes, but there’s something about that structure that continues to captivate. The myth doesn’t age.
Juan Ruocco 🧙♂️
In that sense, Hail Mary functions as a deeply “Disney” movie: a universe where order (both material and symbolic) is threatened, and an individual hero must restore it. The threat, however, does not come from humanity (there's no climate change, no nuclear war, no unchecked capitalism) but from an external force: the astrophages, tiny alien organisms that devour stars, our Sun among them.
And then Rocky shows up.
Alien vs. E.T: the final battle
Hollywood science fiction often represents extraterrestrial life through two main models. On one hand, there's the predatory alien: irrational or incomprehensible, destructive, with whom no cooperation is possible. This is the case with Alien, where the creature is pure hostile biology; Predator, where the relationship with humans is reduced to hunting; or War of the Worlds, where the invasion is total and humanity can barely resist. Even when there is strategic intelligence, as in Independence Day or Edge of Tomorrow, that intelligence does not open the door to dialogue but reinforces military logic and imperialist will. In these universes, the alien is not a possible interlocutor: it is a threat that aims to colonize our planet or annihilate us.
On the other hand, there is the model of the friendly or domesticated alien: an otherness that can be integrated into our emotional and moral categories without conflict. From E.T. to the harmonious encounters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even more contemporary and parodic versions like Paul, this model proposes a relationship based on empathy and cooperation. Even when the difference seems more pronounced, as in Avatar, that otherness quickly becomes legible: the Na’vi embody values (spirituality, connection to nature, community) that the viewer easily recognizes. The difference is not uncomfortable: it is translated and incorporated.
Hollywood science fiction often represents extraterrestrial life through two main models. On one hand, there's the predatory alien (...). On the other hand, there is the model of the friendly or domesticated alien.
Rocky, Grace's adventure companion, clearly belongs to this second model. And what’s interesting is not just how he is constructed, but also which aspects of his world remain off-screen.
Educating Rocky, or the limits of imagination
Although Rocky possesses highly advanced technology, the film avoids delving into his culture, social organization, or mode of production. His otherness is carefully limited: he is different, but not too much. His perception of the world is only slightly different from ours, and his morals align seamlessly with those of the human protagonist.
Another striking detail: Rocky is mechanical, Grace is scientific. The alien masters technique; the human masters abstract thought. And while Rocky seems to have more advanced knowledge in several fields, his language (his way of communicating) is portrayed as something that needs to be deciphered, translated, and domesticated before it can be used. Rocky's technical superiority ultimately becomes subordinate to the interpretive intelligence of the human.
Cultural exchange, then, is unilateral. Grace teaches Rocky our music, our codes, our way of seeing the world; and Rocky responds with fascination. The possibility that the alien civilization could question or destabilize our categories is never at stake. There is no conflict of values, no cultural opacity, no irreducible misunderstandings.
Perhaps the problem is not that science fiction cinema imagines “friendly” or “hostile” aliens, but that in both cases, it makes them legible within our own categories. Even the absolute enemy responds to a recognizable logic: invasion, war, conquest. Even the strangest ally ends up being translatable into emotional terms: friendship, loyalty, cooperation. At both extremes, the alien ceases to be truly other. It becomes a variation, more or less creative depending on the case, of the human.
The possibility that the alien civilization could question or destabilize our categories is never at stake. There is no conflict of values, no cultural opacity, no irreducible misunderstandings.
In this sense, Hail Mary seems to suggest (though it never states it outright) that any "honorable" civilization in the universe essentially shares the same logic: an organization compatible with capitalism, a recognizable morality, a way of perceiving time and space aligned with ours. Even when Rocky technically surpasses Professor Grace, that superiority is narratively subordinated: in the end, the aliens build an artificial beach for the human, and he ends up taking on the role of teacher for the "mini Rockys."
The universe may be vast and unknown, but not so much as to destabilize us.
Embracing discomfort, hand in hand with Le Guin and Chiang
Of course, there are exceptions. Some works of science fiction have attempted to imagine more radical forms of otherness. A particularly powerful example in this vein is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Unlike many narratives where the alien quickly becomes legible, Le Guin constructs an otherness that cannot be reduced to human categories without generating discomfort. The novel takes place on the planet Gethen, whose inhabitants do not have a fixed sex: they are androgynous most of the time and only adopt male or female sexual characteristics during specific periods. This biological organization has profound consequences socially, politically, and emotionally: there is no stable division of gender roles, no patriarchal structures in the sense we know, and no logic of domination associated with sexual difference.
The human protagonist, sent to carry out a diplomatic task, tries to understand this society from his own categories (male/female, friendship/desire, politics/betrayal) and constantly fails. Not because the Gethenians are hostile or incomprehensible in themselves, but because the human's conceptual framework proves insufficient. The novel does not offer a reassuring translation: the reader, like the protagonist, is forced to inhabit the discomfort of not fully understanding. In this sense, otherness is not presented as a problem to be solved, but as an experience that destabilizes. Le Guin does not simply imagine "different aliens"; she questions the universality of our own categories.
Facundo Dell Aqua
A similar phenomenon occurs in Arrival, based on "Story of Your Life," a sort of nouvelle by Ted Chiang. Just like in Le Guin's work, here the language is also not transparent: it is a way of organizing experience. That's why in Arrival, it is a linguist who is tasked with establishing contact with the aliens, called heptapods. This contact is not organized in terms of war or immediate friendship, but through language. The story (and the film) push a fundamental theoretical assumption to its limits: that language is not just a means to communicate thought, but a structure that produces it. The heptapods perceive time non-linearly, and their writing system (circular, simultaneous) reflects that perception. Learning their language means, for the protagonist, altering her own experience of time, and this has consequences that are as subtle as they are terrible in her way of navigating life from that moment on. The encounter with the alien profoundly transforms human experience.
Crossing the Mirror: Difference as Possibility and Power
Difference, both in Le Guin's and Chiang's work, is not resolved: it is inhabited. That possibility (of an Other that we cannot reduce to our categories) is what Hail Mary chooses not to explore. Unlike the Gethenians or the heptapods, Rocky presents no real opacity. There are no areas of persistent misunderstanding, no categories that resist translation. His world may not be identical to ours, but it is perfectly compatible with it.
This difficulty in imagining the different is not exclusive to Hail Mary. It is part of a broader trend in contemporary science fiction cinema that Roberto Chuit Roganovich analyzes in his essay collection The Archipelago. According to Chuit, many current audiovisual narratives advance "up to the headlessness": they take the crisis (environmental, political, biological) to its peak, but barely outline its consequences. The conclusion, Chuit says, is often an updated version of "and they lived happily ever after." The genre that historically dared to imagine radically different futures (dystopias, utopias, profound alterations of the human order) ends up repeating the same structure as fairy tales, only with more sophisticated technology and a darker visual palette. The imaginative horizon closes just when we need it to be wide open.
Juan Ruocco 🧙♂️
Even in films that present extreme scenarios (like Interstellar or The Martian), the resolution again relies on an almost absolute confidence in human rationality and technical and scientific capability to resolve any crisis. The imagination of collapse coexists with a notable difficulty in imagining what comes next.
In Hail Mary, the economic and social collapse of Earth is only hinted at. We know that global temperatures are dropping, that the planet is in crisis, but the narrative chooses to close on an optimistic note, pushing those tensions off the field.
And that imaginative closure is not just narrative. It is also, and above all, a closure in the representation of the Other. Rocky shares our conception of time and space, marvels at our culture, learns our language, adopts our logic. He questions nothing. He threatens nothing. He compels us to rethink nothing. He is the most comforting version of an alien: an intelligent, loyal, technically brilliant pet, but ultimately aligned with the values of any Western civilization.
The paradox is that the figure of the alien could serve as a powerful tool for thinking about the most radical otherness. In an era when we are starting to coexist with non-human intelligences (algorithms, language models, autonomous systems), the question of otherness, of that radical Other, exceeds the realm of science fiction and allows us to genuinely interrogate our reality, exploring all its possibilities. But perhaps, paraphrasing Stanisław Lem in Solaris, humanity has no real desire to know the cosmos or venture into other worlds. What we want is to extend the borders of Earth. We do not need other worlds, Lem writes. We want mirrors.
In an era when we are starting to coexist with non-human intelligences (algorithms, language models, autonomous systems), the question of otherness, of that radical Other, exceeds the realm of science fiction.
And therein lies, at least in my case, part of the symbolic effectiveness of Hail Mary. In a global context marked by uncertainties (wars whose logic escapes our understanding, crises whose outcomes we cannot anticipate), there is something profoundly reassuring about this image of a friendly, habitable universe, essentially similar to the best of us.
I left the cinema feeling happy. Gosling is great, the movie has genuinely exciting moments, and the sweet popcorn always adds to the experience.
But I couldn't help but think, back on the street, that the alien we are willing to imagine says a lot about the limits of our imagination. That the genre that should push us toward the unknown has, for decades, stylishly and with excellent special effects, been bringing us back home.
And that the only version of the Other we can tolerate is one that, deep down, only confirms who we are.
